I miss the kind of easy social connection from being so near friends. This worked well in the university dorms, where it was easy to pop out of my room and wander down the hall to see if anyone was hanging out. Now, pretty much all of my friends are at least a 10 minute drive, with most over 30 minutes. We’re so scattered across the city.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we could restructure living arrangements to improve density, drive connection, and grow local scenes. The scattered single family dwellings approach drives a lot of isolation and disconnection between people.
There are also inefficiencies that come with being so spread out. Every house has a kitchen with a large suite of tools, all of which sits idle almost all the time.
I’ve been envisioning an apartment complex similar to university dorms, with small suites that have an ensuite bathroom, but shared kitchen and laundry.
The top of the apartment complex would be living dwellings and the bottom would have an array of restaurants surrounding a communal food court / mess hall area. The idea is people wouldn’t cook much for themselves, instead eating mostly from the restaurants in the mess hall.
With this arrangement, it should be doable to provide food for the occupants of the building for only a little bit above the cost of the ingredients. It should be cheaper and way better as a social experience.
The land cost is low because it’s a layer in a dense apartment complex. The kitchen can run for 16 plus hours a day with multiple shifts, so the tooling cost amortizes to zero pretty quickly.
It’s high volume passing through one location, so it’s easy to deliver ingredients and there’s no cost for e.g Uber eats to deliver finished food to the customers. I’d need to run the numbers to figure out the actual marginal cost, but it should be much cheaper.
This would drive connection between the residents of the building. Instead of making dinner alone in the evening, you can pop into the mess hall to get delicious food and see whichever friends happen to be down there at the same time. Not feeling up to socializing? That’s fine - buy food, then take it up into your suite to eat there.
There’s a bit of a noise/smell issue having the restaurants right beside living suites, so if you separated those layers with a couple layers of office space, you could resolve that issue and provide a customer base for the restaurants during the day.
A similar trick is probably doable with laundry / dry cleaning / tailoring. Sneaking a services business into a vertical stack complex both reduces the land cost and increases the number of customers within a viable travel radius - win-win.
Most of this is economic argument for why this would be more efficient, and I think I’m underselling how nice it would be to pop down into the mess hall and bump into friends. You could also have folks playing cards, Mahjong, chess, etc. It would be an easy gathering space for the community, which would also be fantastic for little shops that provide coffee / snacks / etc.
Originally posted as this Twitter thread